UR, Iraq (Reuters) – Ur’s palaces and temples lie in ruins, but its hulking Ziggurat still dominates the desert flatlands of what is now southern Iraq, as it has for millennia.

Climbing the Ziggurat’s baked-brick stairway to its wind-scoured summit, you gaze over the royal cemetery excavated 90 years ago by Leonard Woolley, a Briton who recovered treasures rivaling those found in Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt in 1924.

Very little work has been done here since, but British archaeologists are now back in the area despite the insecurity in Iraq that had kept them – and all but the most adventurous tourists – away from one of the world’s oldest cities.

Brushing the caked dust from their clothes, Jane Moon and Stuart Campbell arrive back in Ur from another day of digging in a smaller settlement at Tell Khaiber, 20 km (13 miles) away.

“We have some idea of what we’ve got. It’s very large, it’s got to be a public building, perhaps a temple,” says Moon, who first worked in Iraq fresh from university in the mid-1970s. “The next thing is to understand how it works.”

Moon, co-director of the dig with Campbell and her husband Robert Killick, says the structure dates to the early second millennium BC. Pottery shards indicate that people occupied the site 1,000 or even 2,000 years before that.

In his day, Woolley marshaled hundreds of laborers to lay bare Ur, a city built and rebuilt over millennia, relying on his knowledge of architecture and pottery for guidance.

His successors at Tell Khaiber employ only 16 Iraqi workers, but use satellite images, environmental analysis and geophysical surveying – tools Woolley would have relished.

This is a relatively tranquil corner of Iraq, but the authorities provide armed guards to shuttle the British team to Tell Khaiber and back to the dig-house at Ur every day.

“We have to have security wherever we go, but hey, you know it’s worth it. This place is fantastic,” says Moon.

ORIGINS OF CIVILISATION

A decade after the U.S.-led war that deposed Saddam Hussein, foreign visitors need official permits and an armed escort to pass the army checkpoints barring access to Ur.

The site is a potential magnet for tourists in the heart of Mesopotamia, where urban dwelling, writing and central state power began, but few come – dozens of white golf buggies meant to ferry them around wait idly in the Ziggurat’s shadow.

Just beyond the perimeter of the ruins lies Tallil air base, once bombed and later occupied by the Americans. Nearby is the gritty town of Nasiriya, through which invaders surged on their way to Baghdad in 2003. Ur escaped serious war damage.

The British team and an Italian one working at a Babylonian town in Abu Tbeira, 19 km from Ur, are the only international digging ventures now in Iraq outside the Kurdish north.

“This part of southern Iraq, ancient Babylonia, Sumer and Akkad before that, is probably the most important place in the world from the point of view of the origins of civilization,” says Moon, wearing a white headscarf against the sun and dust.

“No significant excavation has taken place here since the 1940s. Because of all the troubles of the last few years, no one has worked here. We thought it was time to come back.”

In its heyday, Ur was a hub for trade ranging as far as Afghanistan, India, Turkey, Oman and Egypt. The Gulf coast long ago receded southward and the Euphrates has changed course, stranding the city far inland and severing it from the river that once fed irrigation canals stretching to Tell Khaiber and beyond.

“ENORMOUSLY BUREAUCRATIC”

From the Ziggurat, Woolley looked east to “the dark tasseled fringe of the palm groves of the river’s bank”, seeing only “a waste of unprofitable sand” in all other directions, he wrote in “Ur of the Chaldees”.

While it may conceal Iraq’s oil wealth, the desert looks just as unsuitable for cultivation today. Even by the Euphrates, salination has ravaged the soil.

Yet thousands of years ago, successful farming was the bedrock of sophisticated city-states such as Ur and the powerful kingdoms in which they were sometimes welded together.

“The key to a lot of the functioning of society was the very rich agriculture and the concentration and control of that surplus to support priests, temple personnel, the hierarchy in general, armies and specialist producers of metalwork, pottery and everything else that made up the complete economy,” Campbell says.

“It was an enormously bureaucratic society,” he says of Ur at its zenith in 2,600 to 2,500 BC – a description that also fits modern Iraq. “Written records were being used to track goods being moved around, to communicate over long distances.

The British team uses chemical analysis of pottery for insights into diet, drink and cookery, as well as the technology used to produce it. Such techniques also help trace the origins of the stone, metal and wood imported to a region naturally lacking in such materials.

“We look at environmental material, little pieces of bone, seeds, to try and reconstruct the economy, to find out what people were cultivating and how they cultivated it,” Moon says.

MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA

Woolley was more focused on uncovering buildings than on such micro-analysis. His finds – jewelry, daggers, lyres and other artworks crafted in gold, silver, bronze, lapis lazuli and carnelian – riveted public attention at the time.

Many of these came from 16 “royal” graves, where he found “death pits” containing the remains of attendants apparently killed to accompany their kings and queens into the next world. One held the neatly laid-out bodies of 68 women and six men.

Woolley, aware how publicity could help raise vital funds, played on Ur’s presumed status as Abraham’s native city, and linked evidence of an inundation there to Sumerian tales of a great flood on which he said the Bible story of Noah was based.

These ideas have been contested, but they helped produce a flow of distinguished visitors to the dig from 1924 to 1932, among them Agatha Christie, then a 38-year-old divorcee who was to marry one of Woolley’s assistants, Max Mallowan.

Based on her experiences there, Christie wrote “Murder in Mesopotamia” in 1935, in which the archaeologist in charge is modeled on Woolley, and the murder victim, a woman by turns charming and imperious, on his formidable wife Katharine.

Asked if any aspiring women crime writers had visited the present dig-house at Ur, Campbell grins: “Not so far, but if it happens, maybe that could be a source of sponsorship as well.”

The Ur region project is backed by Iraq’s State Board for Antiquities and Heritage, the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and the University of Manchester, plus private donors.

Woolley’s dig was sponsored by the British Museum and the Philadelphia University Museum, which house many of his finds.

Gertrude Bell, the British archaeologist and imperial administrator who founded the Iraq Museum in the 1920s and became head of antiquities, ensured many of the finest artefacts stayed in the country whose borders she helped draw.

Under a 1932 antiquities law, foreign archaeologists must turn everything over to the Iraq National Museum.

BAGHDAD, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Iraq cannot finance its
projected 2014 budget deficit unless the northern Kurdistan
region pays its oil export revenue into the national treasury -
or loses its share of state spending, a senior lawmaker said on
Sunday.

Haider al-Abadi, head of parliament’s treasury committee,
told Reuters the budget, swollen by extra expenditure, would
“collapse” if the state kept paying the autonomous region its 17
percent share even as the Kurds withhold oil export proceeds.

Baghdad’s chronic quarrel with Kurdistan over how to manage
and share Iraq’s energy resources intensified this month when
the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) said oil had begun flowing
to Turkey for export via a pipeline outside federal
control.

Last week Iraq’s oil minister threatened legal action and
drastic trade reprisals against Turkey and any foreign companies
involved in what he called the “smuggling” of Iraqi oil.

Kurdistan’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani arrived in the
Iraqi capital on Sunday to pursue talks on an issue that has
bedevilled relations between Iraq’s Arabs and minority Kurds.

“We go to Baghdad with the intention of closing gaps,” KRG
spokesman Safeen Dizayee said before the talks, which he said
would focus on increasing Kurdistan’s oil output and a mechanism
for marketing its exports.

Abadi said the draft budget projected a deficit of about 21
trillion Iraqi dinars ($18 billion), assuming the Kurds paid the
treasury the revenue from budgeted oil exports of 400,000
barrels per day – a target industry sources say far exceeds
Kurdistan’s current export capacity of around 255,000 bpd.

To Baghdad’s fury, the Kurds handed over no oil export
revenue last year because of an unresolved dispute over the
payment of oil companies operating in the northern region.

For much of 2013 the Kurds were trucking what industry
sources estimated was up to 60,000 bpd of crude and condensates
to Turkey, while the independent pipeline was being completed.

In 2012, the Kurds exported 61,000 bpd of crude via the
Baghdad-controlled pipeline to Turkey, so the revenue went
automatically to the central government.

Baghdad complained at the time that the Kurds should have
exported more than double this amount, however.

BUDGET CRUNCH

Abadi said state spending had risen sharply in the draft
budget due to increases in pensions and the minimum public
sector wage, child benefits and student allowances.

Echoing remarks made in the past week by Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki and Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi, Abadi said the
central government would have to cut the Kurds’ budget share.

“They are not contributing, so why should they get something
out of it?” he asked in an interview. “At the moment we have a
deficit of 21 trillion. If you add 15 to 16 trillion to it, the
budget will collapse,” he said, estimating the additional
shortfall if no Kurdish oil revenue is handed over.

Abadi, who is also a senior member of Maliki’s Shi’ite
Islamist Dawa party, said time was running out for the budget to
be passed before parliament is dissolved ahead of an election on
April 30. He said it would be hard to muster a quorum of 163 of
the assembly’s 325 members during an electoral campaign.

Kurdish and Sunni Muslim opposition lawmakers would stay
away, as would MPs busy campaigning or those without a motive to
turn up because they were not running for re-election, he said.

Abadi accused the Kurds of seeking to prolong oil talks
until after the poll to entrench a fait accompli whereby they
pocket their own revenue from oil “officially” piped to Turkey
and still receive their 17 percent share of the federal budget.

Kurdish officials say that in practice Kurdistan receives
closer to 10 percent of the national budget.

Even if the Kurds paid over notional oil revenues of 17 or
18 trillion dinars from exports of 400,000 bpd, Abadi said,
Baghdad would only just be able to bridge its 2014 budget gap.

He said the withholding of Kurdistan’s earnings also
violated a U.N. Security Council resolution under which all
Iraqi oil export proceeds must be paid into a U.N.-approved
account in New York from which five percent must be deducted to
pay war reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s 1990 invasion.

BAGHDAD/DUBAI (Reuters) – Nuri al-Maliki’s political skills have kept him at the pinnacle of power in Iraq since 2006, but the Shi’ite Muslim leader has yet to heal the wounds of a country traumatized by tyranny, occupation and communal strife.

His critics say he has exacerbated that legacy by gaining undue control over the army, police and security services and using them freely against Sunni Muslim and other political foes, while allowing grave abuses in prisons and detention centers.

Yet in April voters may well hand a third term to Maliki – a hardbitten political operator who emerged from obscurity to become prime minister nearly eight years ago – or at least give him a headstart in post-election wrangling for the job.

He spent much of his life before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 in exile in Syria and Iran, plotting revolt and fearing betrayal.

Maliki was born in 1950 in Janaja, a southern village among date groves on the Euphrates, into a politically engaged family – his grandfather wrote poetry inciting rebellion against Iraq’s British occupiers and his father was a fervent Arab nationalist.

He secretly joined the Shi’ite Islamist Dawa party as a youth, attending Baghdad University’s Islamic law college before becoming a low-level bureaucrat in Hilla, south of the capital.

In 1979 he was briefly arrested and then fled, narrowly escaping Saddam’s police. His family’s land was seized and dozens of his relatives were killed over the next decade. He did not see his home village again until after the 2003 invasion.

That troubled history may color his outlook today.

“UTTERLY RUTHLESS”

“He has proved a fantastically able manipulator of the scene and utterly ruthless,” said Crispin Hawes, managing director of Teneo Intelligence, who has followed Maliki’s career closely for years.

“That ruthlessness is partially explained by his entirely pragmatic view of Iraqi politics. His goal is solely to further the interests of his (Shi’ite) constituency.”

Short on charm, he has a steely determination to best his enemies, especially after the 2010 parliamentary poll which the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc led by Iyad Allawi narrowly won, only to be outmaneuvered and shut out by Maliki in the aftermath.

He may have won out against Allawi, a secular Shi’ite, securing a new mandate with Iranian and U.S. support after eight months of political infighting, but the initial shock defeat appears to have narrowed his ruling style.

A former senior adviser to Maliki is cited by Iraq expert Toby Dodge of the London School of Economics as saying the prime minister began keeping decision-making far more to himself after the formation of his government in 2010.

“Maliki’s paranoia went stratospheric and he wouldn’t listen to any advice,” Dodge quoted the adviser as saying.

The election also discouraged Sunnis who, after boycotting earlier U.S.-sponsored elections, had put their faith in the ballot box and supported Iraqiya – only to see it stymied after its success. “It’s against that background that violence and alienation has flourished in Anbar,” Dodge said.

Maliki now faces a huge challenge from al Qaeda-linked militants who have taken over Falluja, in the Sunni heartland province of Anbar next to Syria, where they are also fighting.

He has demanded that Falluja tribes and citizens expel the gunmen, but says the army will not assault the city.

The 63-year-old, who struggled for decades against Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime as a member of the underground Shi’ite Islamist Dawa party, denies his outlook is sectarian.

“PERVERTS AND DEVIANTS”

“I am not fighting in Anbar because they are Sunnis, as I have also fought Shi’ite militias. Al Qaeda and militias are one – they both kill people and blow them up.

In 2008, he sent troops to suppress militias from rival Shi’ite factions which were controlled the oil hub of Basra.

Maliki lists ending sectarianism and militias among his core principles, along with promoting a strong, stable, unified and sovereign Iraq that poses no threat to its neighbors.

He must also balance relations with the United States, whose invasion brought Shi’ites to power, against those with Iran, which wields more influence in Iraq than the distant superpower.

Maliki, a proud Iraqi nationalist, says he is beholden to neither, wants good ties with both, and puts Iraq’s interests first. “All sides understand the situation,” he declared.

Hawes said Maliki had gone out of his way to maintain his relationship with the United States “against squeals of protests from Iran”.

Maliki was also very cooperative with Tehran when it suited him, he added: “But he’s not the sort of Iranian stooge that he’s described as or often seen as by his opponents.”

The United States has sent limited military aid to help Baghdad combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al Qaeda affiliate which is also fighting in Syria’s civil war.

But Washington has also urged Maliki to reach out to Sunnis feeling disenfranchised in the post-Saddam era.

Maliki told Reuters the government would pay and arm anyone combating al Qaeda as part of “Sahwa” (Awakening) Sunni tribal militias that helped U.S. forces drive back the militants in Anbar in 2006-07.

FEAR OF SUNNI RESURGENCE

However, his offer may not herald political concessions to the Sunnis or a move toward genuine reconciliation – policy steps which would be hard to sell to his Shi’ite supporters, who are among the prime targets of al Qaeda suicide bombers.

“Like all Shi’ites, he’s very nervous – they have this tremendous fear of the Sunnis rising up and putting the Shi’ites and the Kurds back in their place,” said James Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Noting Maliki’s efforts to restrain hotheads in his own community, he said Shi’ite militias had not retaliated lately against Sunni civilians as they had when al Qaeda unleashed the sectarian bloodletting of 2006-07 in which tens of thousands of Iraqis died.

“Maybe Maliki to some degree deserves some credit for that if he deserves some blame for inflaming the situation with the Sunnis,” Jeffrey said.

“He’s happy with the consequences to solidify Shi’ite votes behind him,” said the London-based Dodge.

U.S. President Barack Obama, hosting Maliki in November, urged him to promote sectarian reconciliation, but American influence has waned since U.S. troops left two years ago.

“We have the leaders we have here, and we have to work with them as best as we can,” a senior U.S. official said when asked whether Washington regarded Maliki as a leader who was sincerely interested in forging a more inclusive government.

Jeffrey said Maliki was not an easy man to influence.

“From my experience, if you threaten him and say we will not give you assistance, that is not going to compel him to do things he doesn’t want to do because frankly he can turn to the Iranians or the Russians,” the former U.S. envoy said. “He must prefer to turn to us though, to keep a balance.”

Maliki, who is married with four children, says his job leaves him no time for anything outside politics and a career he says has been guided by the same principles throughout.

“I was who I am and will stay who I am,” he told Reuters. “I do not have another hidden character.”

(Additional reporting by Suadad al-Salhy in Baghdad and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Bombs hit Iraq’s capital Baghdad and a village near the northern town of Baquba on Wednesday, killing at least 59 people, police and hospital sources said, as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki warned that militants were trying to set up an “evil statelet.”

In the deadliest incident, a bomb blew up in a funeral tent where mourners were marking the death two days ago of a Sunni Muslim pro-government militiaman, police said. It killed 18 people and wounded 16 in Shatub, a village south of Baquba.

Two years after U.S. troops left Iraq, violence has climbed back to its highest levels since the Sunni-Shi’ite bloodshed of 2006-2007, when tens of thousands of people were killed.

The army is locked in a standoff with Sunni militants who overran Falluja, a city west of Baghdad, more than two weeks ago in a challenge to Maliki’s government.

They are led by the al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is fighting in western Iraq and Syria to carve out a cross-border Islamist fiefdom.

“The battle will be long and will continue,” Maliki said on state television on Wednesday, calling for world support. “If we keep silent it means the creation of evil statelets that would wreak havoc with security in the region and the world.”

Maliki has ruled out an assault on Falluja by the troops and tanks ringing the city of 300,000, but has told local tribesmen to expel ISIL, which has exploited anger among minority Sunnis against a government they accuse of oppressing them.

Al Qaeda loyalists are pursuing a relentless campaign of attacks, mostly aimed at security forces, Shi’ite civilians and Sunnis seen as loyal to the Shi’ite-led government.

The violence has dismayed leaders of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. “This is a disaster,” its president’s chief of staff Fuad Hussein told Reuters. “Now the whole country is being threatened by terrorists, so we need to have a common front.”

At least seven bombs struck the Iraqi capital, mostly in Shi’ite districts, killing 37 people and wounding 78, police and medics said. A car bomb in Dujail, a Shi’ite town 50 km (31 miles) north of Baghdad, killed three people and wounded seven.

The bombings followed attacks that cost at least 24 lives the day before, as well as coordinated assaults by militants on a highway bridge and police station near Falluja.

A suicide bomber in an explosives-laden fuel tanker blew it up under the bridge near the town of Saqlawiya, about 10 km (six miles) north of Falluja, causing the bridge to collapse and destroying one of two army tanks parked on top, police said. Gunmen then attacked and destroyed the second tank.

Simultaneously, dozens of militants stormed a police station in Saqlawiya, forcing its occupants to surrender. Army helicopters later attacked the gunmen in the police station, but failed to evict them. Armed tribesmen hostile to al Qaeda were preparing an assault on the police station on Wednesday.

The wrecked bridge spans the main highway leading west from Baghdad across the vast Sunni desert province of Anbar towards Syria and Jordan. Police said the truck bomber had driven from Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar.

(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Raheem Salman in Baghdad and Isabel Coles in Arbil; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

A suicide bomber in an explosives-laden fuel tanker blew it up under a highway bridge near the town of Saqlawiya, about 10 km (six miles) north of Falluja, causing the bridge to collapse and destroying one of two army tanks parked on top, police said. Gunmen then attacked and destroyed the second tank.

Simultaneously, dozens of militants stormed a police station in Saqlawiya, forcing its occupants to surrender. Army helicopters later attacked the gunmen in the police station.

The destroyed bridge lies on the main highway leading west from Baghdad across the vast Sunni desert province of Anbar towards Syria and Jordan. Police said the suicide truck bomber had driven from Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar.

Two years after U.S. troops left Iraq, violence has climbed back to its highest levels since the Sunni-Shi’ite bloodshed of 2006-07, when tens of thousands of people were killed.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the spate of attacks in Baghdad but the Shi’ite-led government has blamed al Qaeda-affiliated militants who have regained a strong presence in western Iraq, helped by the civil war in neighboring Syria.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has sworn to eradicate al Qaeda, but has ruled out an army assault on Falluja, saying tribesmen and residents must force the militants to leave.

BOMBS AT MARKET AND ON BUS

The al Qaeda branch now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has played on anger among Iraq’s minority Sunnis against Maliki’s Shi’ite-led government, which they accuse of oppressing them and excluding them from power.

The Falluja crisis and the worsening violence pose a major challenge to Maliki, who faces parliamentary polls in April.

In Tuesday’s deadliest attacks in Baghdad, two car bombs killed nine people and wounded 23 in a crowded street in the mainly Sunni Ghazaliya district, police and medics said.

A roadside bomb blew up in a busy market in the mainly Shi’ite Husseiniya area, killing three and wounding eight.

Earlier, a bomb attached to a bus killed three people and wounded 12 in the capital’s mostly Shi’ite Talbiya neighborhood, while a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed a passer-by in the mainly Shi’ite Kadhimiya district.

In western Baghdad, gunmen killed a judge and his driver in a drive-by shooting in Yarmouk district, police said, and gunmen killed two soldiers at a checkpoint in Abu Ghraib.

Four mortar rounds landed on houses in the town of Garma, 30 km (20 miles) northwest of Baghdad and not far from Falluja, killing four people, a local official and hospital sources said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in a striking change of course, is embracing the Sunni Muslim tribal fighters whose role in combating al Qaeda he had allowed to wither after U.S. troops left two years ago.

Al Qaeda-linked militants, feeding off widespread Sunni resentment at perceived mistreatment by his Shi’ite-led government, swept into the cities of Falluja and Ramadi two weeks ago in an embarrassing setback to Maliki.

His chances of a third term after a parliamentary election in April hang partly on his ability to project an image as a strong national figure who can impose security and stability.

Maliki has used al Qaeda’s resurgence to muster foreign support for his government, which has otherwise disappointed the United States and allies by moving close to Iran and its failure to forge consensus with the once-dominant Sunni minority.

International engagement was evident on Monday with a visit to Baghdad by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

“We are happy that the whole world stood by us in an unprecedented way,” the 63-year-old Maliki, who has been in office since 2006, told Reuters on Sunday.

But as security unravels in Falluja, Ramadi and other parts of Sunni-dominated Anbar province, Maliki appears to have heeded U.S. and other voices urging him to do more to enlist Sunni tribal support against al Qaeda and its allies.

He is turning the money taps back on to try to quench an insurgency by al Qaeda’s latest incarnation in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose rise has helped drive violence back to the worst level in five years.

The Sahwa (Awakening) militias that joined forces with U.S. troops to combat, if not defeat, al Qaeda in 2006-07 when Sunni-Shi’ite violence was at its peak can once again expect full support and recognition from the state, Maliki says.

“Those people contribute to achieving security and the government has to take care of them,” he said, briskly fielding questions at an ornate, flag-decked reception room in his three-storey palace in Baghdad’s heavily guarded “Green Zone”.

Any tribesmen fighting alongside the Iraqi army against al Qaeda would be considered part of Sahwa.

“They will get regular salaries and will be recognized by the government as security personnel and will get all the benefits of the security forces members,” he said.

NO ASSAULT ON FALLUJA

Maliki said there would be “no limit” to recruiting, arming and equipping Sahwa fighters, whose monthly wages were more than doubled a few months ago to 500,000 dinars ($430).

Money was not a problem, said the prime minister, since all such expenses would be met outside the state budget.

“Because security is the priority in such circumstances, the cabinet last week approved keeping security (costs), including weapons, salaries and other equipment out of the budget.”

Iraqi troops and armed tribesmen regained control of Ramadi, Anbar’s provincial capital last week. The army is surrounding Falluja, but Maliki ruled out any frontal attack on a city which endured two devastating U.S. assaults in 2004.

“We want to end the presence of those militants without any bloodshed because the people of Falluja have suffered a lot,” he said, insisting the people of the city must expel al Qaeda.

“There is a good response from Falluja’s sons and tribes,” he said. “We do not care how long this takes.”

Whether Maliki can or will address the underlying grievances of the Sunni minority, which lost power when Saddam Hussein and his Baath party were toppled by U.S.-led forces in 2003, and give it a real say in Iraq’s affairs remains doubtful. Sunni Arabs account for up to 30 percent of the population.

Relentless bombings aimed at the security forces, Shi’ite civilians, pro-government Sunni fighters and others had complicated reform efforts even before the Falluja crisis.

For now an anti-terrorism law and “de-Baathification” provisions seen by Sunnis as discriminatory seem likely to stay on the statute books at least until the April 30 election.

Meantime, Maliki envisages a military campaign against ISIL in Anbar and beyond, drawing strength from newly supplied U.S. Hellfire missiles, intelligence and satellite imagery, as well as recently delivered Russian attack helicopters.

He said Iraq would eventually require combat fighters and long-range missiles to defend its sovereignty, but the immediate need was for light and heavy infantry weapons to fight al Qaeda.

CLEAN-UP CAMPAIGN

“This is not a battle of armies, it’s a guerrilla battle, street fighting,” Maliki said, adding that troops and tribesmen needed anti-aircraft guns to use as infantry weapons against foes amply supplied with arms smuggled from distant Libya.

The Iraqi leader said the Anbar campaign would be followed by a “clean-up” against al Qaeda in Mosul, Salahaddin and Diyala provinces. “We started in Anbar and won’t stop until we finish off the last cell in this sinister organization,” he declared.

ISIL is also on the frontline of the civil war in Syria, where it is battling President Bashar al-Assad’s troops as well as rival rebel groups incensed by its ruthless behavior.

Maliki said internal fighting between ISIL and the Nusra Front, another al Qaeda-linked group in Syria, was weakening both organizations and reducing pressure on Iraq.

He asserted that most weapons used by militants in Iraq were coming from Syria – although fighters and arms move both ways across the porous 605-km (378-mile) border, including some Iraqi Shi’ite militiamen who are fighting on Assad’s side.

Maliki said Iraq was neutral in the Syrian conflict and frowned on any meddling by foreign fighters or outside powers.

“We believe that aligning with any of the parties in the crisis is very risky. We absolutely refuse to be involved in the crisis in any way. No weapons, no supplies and no fighters.”

Maliki, whose government has been accused by Washington of allowing Iranian flights to deliver weapons to Assad’s forces across Iraqi airspace, said only negotiations could end the war.

“We support Geneva 2,” he said, referring to next week’s planned peace talks in Switzerland. But he made clear the conference, tasked with arranging an agreed political transition in Syria, had no right to force the Syrian leader to step down.

“His future will be decided by his people and the ballot box,” said Maliki, who spent years in exile in Syria and Iran as an underground leader of the Shi’ite Islamist Dawa party.

Syria has become a pawn in a fierce regional power struggle between Shi’ite Iran and Sunni heavyweight Saudi Arabia, which was aghast when the U.S. occupation after Saddam’s fall brought about the elections that empowered Iraq’s Shi’ite majority.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki promised on Sunday there would be no military assault on Falluja to spare the city more carnage, and he said Sunni Muslim tribesmen would be given time to expel al Qaeda-linked fighters.

“We want to end the presence of those militants without any bloodshed because the people of Falluja have suffered a lot,” he told Reuters in an interview, referring to the devastating assaults by U.S. forces to evict insurgents in 2004.

Maliki said he had reassured fearful residents of Falluja that the army would not attack, but that they must take the city back from the militants who overran it on January 1.

“There is a good response from Falluja’s sons and tribes,” the Iraqi leader said. “We do not care how long this takes.”

Fighters of the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and their tribal allies took over Falluja and parts of the nearby city of Ramadi nearly two weeks ago at a time of Sunni anger at the Shi’ite-led government stirred by a bloody raid to arrest a Sunni politician in Ramadi.

Iraqi security forces and tribesmen hostile to ISIL regained control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, last week.

Maliki said the army would keep surrounding Falluja, 70 km (44 miles) west of Baghdad, to stop militants from using it as a base or a launchpad for attacks. “The important thing is not to attack the city and kill innocent people because of those criminals.”

The Kurdistan Regional Government said last week that crude had begun to flow to Turkey and exports were expected to start at the end of this month and then rise in February and March.

“This is a constitutional violation which we will never allow, not for the (Kurdistan) region nor for the Turkish government,” Maliki told Reuters in an interview.

He reiterated Baghdad’s insistence that only the central government has the authority to manage Iraq’s energy resources.

“Turkey must not interfere in an issue that harms Iraqi sovereignty,” Maliki said.

The central government and the Kurds differ over how to interpret the constitution’s references to oil and how revenues should be shared. The Kurdish share was set at 17 percent after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, although the Kurds frequently complain that they get less than that.

Maliki said the Kurds had not met their budgeted commitment to export 250,000 barrels per day of oil, with the revenue going to the national treasury, but that so far the government had not retaliated by reducing their share of the budget.

“We did not do that as we did not want to affect the Kurdish people and we were looking to find acceptable solutions…that would preserve national unity and the national wealth, but this year the situation looks difficult,” Maliki declared.

Referring to a dispute over the costs of oil companies operating in Iraqi Kurdistan, he said: “We have been telling these companies…give us the oil and we will pay your costs, but they did not deliver, so there will be no payments.”

Maliki said it was unfair to expect Baghdad to pay the oil firms’ costs, plus the Kurds’ 17 percent budget share, when the oil revenue was not being channeled through the government.

In October 2012, the Kurds agreed to export an average of 250,000 bpd in 2013 if Baghdad paid the operators in the region. As the wrangling went on, the Kurds stopped pumping oil via the Baghdad-controlled pipeline to Turkey, instead exporting smaller quantities by truck and taking the revenue directly.

Iraqi Kurdistan has prospered over the past decade, largely escaping the violence unleashed in the rest of the country after the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Kurdish leaders say they prefer the region to remain part of a federal Iraq, rather than seeking secession, but oil is a highly sensitive issue in volatile relations with Baghdad.

Companies that have risked exploring for oil in Iraqi Kurdistan had welcomed its plans to pipe oil to Turkey as a signal they might begin to generate export income from their investments, despite Baghdad’s objections.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A suicide bomber killed 23 Iraqi army recruits and wounded 36 in Baghdad on Thursday, officials said, in an attack on men volunteering to join the government’s struggle to crush al Qaeda-linked militants in Anbar province.

Brigadier General Saad Maan, spokesman for the Baghdad Security Operations Centre which coordinates among military, police and other security organizations, said the bomber had blown himself up among the recruits at the small Muthanna airfield, used by the army in the Iraqi capital.

Maan put the death toll at 22 but health ministry officials said morgue records showed 23 had been killed.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred a day after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said he would eradicate the “evil” of al Qaeda and its allies.

Fighters from the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is also at the forefront of Syria’s civil war, last week seized control of Falluja and parts of Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s western Anbar province.

The Shi’ite-led government has asked for volunteers to join the military effort against al Qaeda, which has regained strength in Sunni-dominated areas such as Anbar partly by exploiting widespread Sunni resentment over Maliki’s policies.

Bloodshed in Iraq has returned to its highest level in five years, with the United Nations reporting 8,868 people killed in 2013 – a surge of violence partly fuelled by the war in Syria.

Also on Thursday, police said a car bomb exploded near a local health department building in the city of Tikrit, north of Baghdad and hometown of deposed Sunni leader Saddam Hussein. An ambulance driver was killed and five other people wounded.

FALLUJA CALMER

Residents in Falluja reported a calmer day after some overnight mortar fire. Militants were keeping a low profile. Troops on the outskirts made no attempt to enter the city, many of whose 300,000 residents fled after clashes last week.

But it is not clear whether a deal reached between Maliki’s government and Sunni tribal leaders, under which the militants would withdraw and the army would stay outside Falluja, can end the struggle for the city 70 km (45 miles) west of Baghdad.

“We don’t want this city to suffer and we will not use force, as long as the tribes announce their readiness to confront al Qaeda and expel it,” Maliki said on Wednesday.

The violence has alarmed Western governments and pointed up the links between Sunni militants in Iraq and Syria, but Iraq’s oil industry and its foreign investors see no cause for panic, given that main oil fields are far from Anbar.

Thousands of civilians streamed out of Falluja after ISIL and allied Sunni tribesmen overran police stations 10 days ago, but a few have returned in hopes that negotiations will avert a full-scale army assault on a city that endured two devastating U.S. offensives against Sunni insurgents there in 2004.

According to the United Nations, more than 11,000 families have fled their homes in Anbar province. U.N. agencies delivered the first relief supplies to the displaced people on Wednesday.

“It is essential to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the people in Anbar province, particularly those in Falluja and surrounding areas,” Nikolay Mladenov, the U.N. envoy to Iraq, said in a statement on Thursday.

GOVERNMENT BLOCKADE

Human Rights Watch said combatants on both sides were causing civilian casualties in Anbar, with Iraqi government forces apparently using indiscriminate mortar fire, while al Qaeda and its local allies were attacking from populated areas.

“A government blockade of Falluja and Ramadi has resulted in limited access to food, water and fuel for the population,” the U.S.-based group said in a statement.

The blockade is by no means total. A Reuters reporter left Falluja and returned there on Thursday with no questions asked at a checkpoint where a dozen tanks and other armored vehicles were parked with their gun barrels pointed at the city.

More shops and bakeries were open in Falluja than the previous day. The price of a jerrycan of kerosene had fallen to 20,000 dinars ($17) from as much as 40,000 on Wednesday.

Small groups of gunmen lurked in some places, but in general their presence was less visible than before, residents said. Burnt-out cars wrecked in fighting still littered the streets, but some traffic police reappeared at intersections.

Nevertheless, civilians remained wary, with some believing that an army assault was still imminent.

“It is a game,” said one man who asked not to be named. “Why is the army on the outskirts of the city and why is nobody targeting them? I think they are preparing to raid the city.”

In the Kurdish city of Arbil, people who had fled their homes in Falluja said they had feared fierce fighting there.

“As soon as we heard the army was going to attack the city we became very worried because civilians will be the sacrifice,” said Monzher Hazallah, head of a family of nine.

He said masked gunmen had taken over Falluja, but it was not clear how many were ISIL fighters, suggesting that Maliki had emphasized the role of al Qaeda’s role, rather than Iraqi Sunnis with grievances, to justify an attack on the city.

“In our opinion, he chose the timing as part of his election campaign,” he said, referring to parliamentary polls in April.

Abdel Kareem, who fled Falluja five days ago with his family of 10, said army bombardment had killed one of his neighbors: “The army is shelling residential districts,” he said. “You don’t know where it will come from next.”

($1 = 1,164 Iraqi dinars)

(Additional reporting by Isabel Coles in Arbil, Kamal Na’ama in Falluja and Kareem Raheem in Baghdad; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

CAIRO (Reuters) – Three leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the movement’s former arch-foe Hosni Mubarak faced separate trials on Sunday on similar charges of involvement in the killing of protesters.

With Egypt now under an army-installed government after last month’s overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, local media seized on the symbolism of scheduling both sessions on the same day. “Trial of two regimes,” headlined al-Shorouk daily.

The case against Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood’s “General Guide”, and his deputies, Khairat al-Shater and Rashad Bayoumy, relates to unrest before the army removed Mursi on July 3. Mursi has been detained in an undisclosed location since then.

Badie and his deputies were not expected to appear in the first hearing of their case, which will be held behind closed doors for security reasons, a security source said.

Mubarak, who left prison on Thursday after judges ordered his release, was due to attend his session with his jailed sons Gamal and Alaa and former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly.

The former president was sentenced to life in prison last year for complicity in the killing of protesters during the revolt against him, but an appeals court ordered a retrial.

The state news agency MENA said a helicopter would fly Mubarak to the court hearing in the Police Academy on the eastern outskirts of Cairo from a military hospital where he was placed under house arrest after his release from jail.

The government used a state of emergency it declared earlier this month to place Mubarak under house arrest, apparently to forestall any popular anger if he had simply walked free.

The trial of the Brotherhood’s top leaders signals that Egypt’s new army-backed rulers intend to crush what they have portrayed as a violent, terrorist group bent on subverting the state.

The Brotherhood, which won five successive post-Mubarak votes, says it is a peaceful movement unjustly targeted by the generals who ousted Mursi, Egypt’s first freely elected leader.

The military contends it was responding to the people’s will, citing vast demonstrations at the time against the rule of a man criticized for accumulating excessive power, pushing a partisan Islamist agenda and mismanaging the economy.

BROTHERHOOD IN DISARRAY

Charges against Badie and his aides include incitement to violence and relate to an anti-Brotherhood protest outside the group’s Cairo headquarters on July 30 in which nine people were killed and 91 wounded. The 70-year-old Brotherhood leader was detained last week. Shater and Bayoumy were picked up earlier.

More than 1,000 people, including about 100 soldiers and police, have died in violence across Egypt since Mursi’s fall, making it the bloodiest civil unrest in the republic’s 60-year history. Brotherhood supporters say the toll is much higher.

Pro-Mursi crowds staged scattered marches on what they had billed as a “Friday of Martyrs”, but the Brotherhood’s ability to mobilize huge crowds appears to have been enfeebled by the round-up of its leaders and the bloody dispersal of protest camps set up in Cairo to demand the president’s reinstatement.

Mursi’s return is not on the cards for now. The army has announced a roadmap for a return to democracy that involves overhauling the constitution adopted under Mursi last year, with parliamentary and presidential elections to follow.

Changes proposed by a government-appointed legal panel would scrap last year’s Islamic additions to the constitution and revive a Mubarak-era voting system. Islamists and liberals have expressed alarm about the suggestions.

Khaled Dawoud, a member of the liberal Dostour party, said he was worried about plans to retain articles under which journalists risk jail for “insulting the president” and newspapers can be closed for violating media laws – penalties enforced under Mursi, as well as during Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

“I want new freedoms, more freedoms and not to end up with something similar to the 1971 constitution or one worse than Mursi’s 2012 constitution,” he said.

Islamists are also up in arms, for different reasons, saying the changes amount to an assault on Egypt’s “Islamic identity”.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the roadmap and the constitutional process in a call with interim Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy on Friday, MENA reported.

The United States has voiced concern about bloodshed in Egypt since Mursi’s fall. President Barack Obama has stopped short of cutting the $1.5 billion in mostly military U.S. aid to Cairo, but has ruled out any “return to normal business”.